Sustainable Product Innovation Using Patent Mining and TRIZ

Sustainable issues have become more serious due to the rapid development of the global economy. Sustainable design is an approach for designing or creating sustainable products/solutions based on sustainable development principles. Patent documents contain a lot of useful inventive information which will be useful for sustainable product design. However, they are dense and lengthy due to excessive overladen technical terminology. Automatic text mining tool in patent analysis is therefore, in great demand to assist innovators or patent engineers in their patent search. The main focus of this work is to develop a patent mining prototype to extract sustainable design information from the patent database and recommend potential solutions to the user by using Patent Mining and TRIZ. The TRIZ problem solving process and details of patent mining will be described in this paper. Patent mining techniques include tokenization, stop words filtering, stemming, lemmatization and classification. The patent mining techniques were implemented together with relevant sustainable design indicators to identify patent documents that contained the most relevant sustainable design solution or suggestions. A sustainable design problem is illustrated in this paper to demonstrate how a TRIZ user can utilize the implemented patent mining techniques and sustainable design indicators to obtain a sustainable solution for a design problem.